An international team of scientists from the CNR-IFN, Politecnico di Milano, the University of Pisa, the Graphene Center of Cambridge (UK) and the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2, Barcelona) has shown that the relaxation time of graphene charge carriers can be significantly modified by applying an external electrical field.
After light absorption, graphene's photoexcited charge carriers cool down to the initial equilibrium state in a few picoseconds, corresponding to a millionth of a millionth of a second. The remarkable speed of this relaxation process makes graphene particularly promising for a number of technological applications, including light detectors, sources and modulators.
This study may pave the way to the development of devices that exploit the control of the relaxation time of charge carriers to support novel functionalities. For example, if graphene is used as saturable absorber in a laser cavity to generate ultrashort light pulses, by changing the relaxation time of the charge carriers, it'll be possible to control the duration of the output pulses.
The specific device that we have used to study graphene, proved to be crucial to observe the strong tunability of its optical properties with the external electric field, allowing to change the number of charge carriers over a broad range by exploiting ionic liquid gating, which is a state-of-the-art technology introduced to study superconductors, explains Prof. Andrea Ferrari, director of the Graphene Center in Cambridge.
The graphene-based device has been studied by ultrafast spectroscopy, which allowed to monitor the variation of the relaxation time of the charge carriers. This work represents the latest step of a long-standing research collaboration devoted to the study of the ultrafast carrier dynamics in graphene, aimed at exploring the great potential of this fascinating material, added Dr Klaas-Jan Tielrooij, leader of the Ultrafast Dynamics in Nanoscale Systems Group at ICN2.
This discovery is of large interest for a number of technological applications, ranging from photonics, for pulsed laser sources or optical limiters that prevent optical components damaging, to telecommunication, for ultrafast detectors and modulators, concludes Prof. Giulio Cerullo, professor at the Physics Department of Politecnico di Milano.